Steve Pomerance

The list of Boulder’s financial messes keeps growing. What follows is a brief summary of some of the bigger issues. What is clear to me from looking at this is that it will take some very serious reorganization, including not only how things operate, but also how both the City Council and staff members fulfill their responsibilities. It is unacceptable to continue with business as usual. Ben Binder is a civil engineer and has been following the South Boulder Creek project carefully over the years. He recently pointed out to the City Water Resources Advisory Board, “The City’s Capital Improvements Program Guiding Principles specifically state that capital programming should ‘maximize efficiency of investment demonstrated by measurable cost/benefit analyses.’ “Yet I have not found a current cost/benefit analysis for the South Boulder Creek project in the information provided to the WRAB. If staff has not prepared and provided you with such an analysis, then staff has failed to su...

Boulder just added a web page where the city states that it will start building the dam/floodwall for South Boulder Creek in October. No surprise to me, the projected cost went up another $10 million to $76.5 million since last year. (And that’s after spending something like $13 million on multiple re-designs to deal with issues that any intelligent person should have seen early on.) Just to list off some of the many problems that this “downstream” design still faces: The half-mile-long concrete wall along U.S. 36 requires a drainage system to get groundwater under U.S. 36 so as to avoid killing off threatened species on both sides; this will require significant ongoing maintenance to keep from being jammed up with dirt, etc. The detention pond at the north end of CU South property will require a liner, so that it doesn’t fill from high groundwater levels in that area. And the liner requires a drain, so it can empty and isn’t filled by pre-flood rains.  The road into CU South ...